It’s been a fun week over here. I was able to order my 512MB Raspberry Pi from Element 14, and it arrived on Wednesday. Protip: Call Element 14 when they have stock and you will get it really really fast.

Some high quality shots below:

I’ve been working on my Mini Arcade Cabinet project, and I was able to source a mini joystick from P3America.com. I’m going to be working on the cabinet this weekend, and will be incorporating this into it.

Now for the big news….I have created some .debs for you all to test! The latest version of Raspbian has been giving me a lot of compiling errors. What I have gotten done I would appreciate some of you to beta test for me.

The two debs available now are PCSX_ReARMed and Gngeo. PCSX worked for me when I made the framebuffer larger in config.txt, and gngeo seems to be crashing or hanging randomly. I’m hoping it works better for you all. Please provide me with any and all feedback you have regarding these!

Sorry for the late post. The past two days have been jam packed and I had limited internet access.

Friday and Saturday I was at Magic Ruby. It was a Ruby conference at the Walt Disney World Hollywood Studios park. I’m still decompressing from the conference, so I’m not ready to make a full review about it. Some talks were amazing, some were downright crappy. I’m just exhausted.

Right after the conference Friday night, I had to run straight to the FamiLAB Hacker Space in Longwood, Florida because they were hosting Eben and Liz from the Raspberry Pi foundation!

We spent the first part of the night hanging out with Eben and Liz, showing off our projects. Liz loved my arcade cabinet, and I need to get a kit out to her ASAP 🙂 Eben and Liz then did an interview with the Orlando Sentinel (as did I regarding my projects). After the interview, Eben did a presentation to a standing room only gathering of people regarding the Pi, as well as a QA from the audience. It was a great event!

Eben and Liz are both really humble and genuinely nice people. I’m really glad I was able to spend some time with them.

Also, on a side note, my little Color Picker test app for Windows 8 passed certification, and is now in the Windows App Store! Go me!

Been working on this for a bit. I now have limited access to a Laser Cutter. This mini Raspberry Pi Arcade Machine I made is so cool. The initial SVG came from here: http://www.ponoko.com/design-your-own/products/arcade-cabinet-enclosure-7231. I had to modify the holes for the slab of wood I was using and the screen size for my 2″ adafruit display.

It’s been a fun week. I have been playing a LOT of Black Mesa on Steam. If you have never played Half Life then I recommend you pick up this great fan remake of the original game. If you HAVE played Half Life then you need to play this game and see how great it is. It’s free. It’s awesome. It’s a lot of fun. http://release.blackmesasource.com/

Today Adafruit linked to me again. This time about my Battery Powered Pi and how I was using their 2″ screen. That made my day 🙂 The screen is working out great!

On the news about the overclocking…Holy Crap does it make a difference! Street Fighter 2 is now 100% playable, and i’ve been able to load D&D (a CPS2 game) and it play amazingly. I’ll be getting some video of that up soon. If you are using Raspbian, update and upgrade to the latest version. It’s worth it.

Tonight I have uploaded the source and binaries for PCSX_ReARMed. This is an amazing emulator that is running a lot of PSX games at full speed. I have not been able to get sound to work through HDMI yet, but since my last reformat, I haven’t been able to get sound working on anything, so I’m kinda bummed about that. I’m hoping some of you have better luck with the audio.

Good News Everyone! I was able to recover my corrupted filesystem. I also completed a large chunk of a major project I’m working on at the University. This one piece of code has been bugging me for a couple of days, and I finally solved it today, so I feel a lot better. I’m exhausted but hopefully tomorrow I can do some more emulation testing.

I have been testing PCSX_ReARMed for the Pi and it’s working really well. NeoPop-SDL (Neo Geo Pocket Color) emulator is working as well, though it doesn’t fullscreen properly. Mednafen 0.8 (a multi console emulator) is already in the Raspbian Repos. Mednafen 0.9 has trouble compiling out of the box but I was able to get past the issues and it’s working. I’ll be posting binaries this week as well as some tutorials.

So this week started off cool then took a turn for suckage. I’ve been working on getting two more emulators working. One is a Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator, and it works, but has some minor issues. The other is another mass emulator like MESS. The older version compiles, but the latest one errors out.

The reason I am not posting binaries at the moment is because my SD card’s filesystem got corrupted during a test I was doing, and won’t boot. I’ve made a bit for bit backup of the card using DD, and I’m going to try and retrieve as much data from it as possible. Luckily I have other SD cards to use.

I was hoping to have the binaries for NeoPop available tonight but I have to recompile them on the new SD card. If you want you can click the link above and download the source and compile it yourself.

The other emulator I’ve been working on compiling is called Mednafen. The old version (0.8) is available in Raspbian repos, so just do sudo apt-get install mednafen and you should be good to go. Make sure you run it once, then edit the ./mednafen/mednafen.rc file. There is a part that says video and it tries to use opengl, set it to SDL and you should be good to go.

It’s been a long week, and I am really glad I have a long weekend to sleep in.

When the Arduino Leonardo was announced I was really excited to see it have built in USB HID support and could act as a keyboard, mouse, or joystick. I was even more excited to find out that my year old Teensy++ (Arduino compatible board) was based on the same chipset that the Leonardo now uses, and is able to act as a keyboard as well!

This is a new feature that was introduced in the Arduino 1.0 IDE. You can now send keyboard presses with this simple line of code: Keyboard.write(‘a’); If I wanted the Up joystick to be the up arrow on the keyboard, I would just use: Keyboard.write(0x0E); .

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My goal is to use my Neo Geo AES controllers as an input for MAME. The Neo Geo pads don’t have any control boards built into the unit. The console itself interprets each pin individually, just like an actual arcade board. The pad uses a standard midi gameport (DA-15) connector, with each pin representing one button.

My idea is to make a Neo Geo pad to usb adapter using the Teensy++ as go-between. The Neo Geo pins will be wired up to the digital pins on the Teensy, and the Teensy Arduino sketch will interpret each button press as a keyboard press.

I’m looking forward to working on this project. I hope everyone has a great weekend and a restful Labor Day.